QUARTER PO UNDER

Today’s match between Nadal and Djokovic is destined to be the Mayweather-Pacquiao of tennis

The French Open’s accountants must be wishing their TV coverage worked on a pay-per-view model, such is the scale of excitement surrounding the quarter-final today between Novak Djokovic, the world No. 1, and the defending champion Rafael Nadal. This is surely destined to be “le crunch” of the season — the Mayweather-Pacquiao of tennis.

The plot lines are irresistible. It is the King of Clay against the unbreakable man; Nadal’s nitro-glycerine forehand against Djokovic’s frictionless footwork.

There is no tougher task in sport than defeating Nadal at a venue he has made his own. The only man to achieve it is Robin Soderling, the big-hitting Swede who has since been forced off the tour by a combination of glandular fever and postviral fatigue. So while this might be ‘only’ a quarter-final, the ramifications will be felt all year.

Should Djokovic become the second man to interrupt Nadal’s 701 win-loss record at Roland Garros, he will surely believe that he can go on to complete the calendar grand slam, which has not been achieved since Rod Laver did it in 1969.

The calendar slam is the holy grail of tennis, and in the view of threetime French Open champion Mats Wilander it is the one achievement that could catapult Djokovic on to the same plane of popular regard as Nadal and Roger Federer.

“I don’t know if there is room in the hearts of people for another person at the same time,” Wilander said. “Novak’s best chance of being as popular as those two is if he wins the four majors in one year and then keeps going.

“No. 1 in the world is not interesting: it makes no difference because Nadal is hurt six months of the year, and Federer has four kids. You can become No. 1 at some 250-point event and nobody notices, so it’s not necessarily what these guys are playing for. They’re playing for majors.”

The analogy with Mayweather– Pacquiao has its merits, especially as boxing and tennis have more in common than you might think. Yet one significant difference lies in the regularity with which the big names face each other.

Where fighters routinely avoid their most dangerous rivals, Djokovic and Nadal have met 43 times on the professional tour — a record for the Open era — with Nadal’s early 14-4 lead having been whittled back to 23-20.

The tally includes seven grandslam finals, and that five-hour 53-minute marathon in Melbourne that still has Andy Murray marvelling at Djokovic’s ability to recover from a four-hour 50-minute semifinal two days earlier.

Even when you go back over all those epics, it is hard to remember a time when more has been hanging on the result. If Nadal wins, no one will be talking about the five defeats he has endured on clay this season, in his worst run on his favourite surface since 2004. If Nadal wins, he will be the strong favourite to seal La Decima — to borrow a term coined by his beloved Real Madrid. Ten victories at a single grand slam would be an Open era record for either gender, moving Nadal out of a tie with Martina Navratilova’s nine Wimbledons.

And if Nadal wins, it will be a crushing blow for Djokovic, a man who holds the other three titles and is desperate to complete the set. In fact, the challenger has spent the past few French Opens in such a frenzy of anticipation that it affected his health. Last year, Djokovic endured vomiting fits before the final, where Nadal dumped him out of the tournament for the third year in succession.

Yet Djokovic has seemed calmer over the past six months or so. Since Oct 21, in fact, the day he welcomed his first child Stefan into the world. This is a man who has always piled enormous pressure on to himself, to the point where his own lofty ambitions have sometimes inhibited him. So his newfound focus on home and family has proved beneficial, taking the edge off his tennis obsession.

It can be no coincidence that, since becoming a father, he has won not only the Australian Open but all five Masters 1000 events he has entered.

How Djokovic deals with his own expectations today will be crucial. His backhand, which is completely untroubled by shoulder-high balls, has the ability to negate Nadal’s curling, exploding forehands. He will also be delighted if the forecasters — who were predicting a moderately breezy 19C — prove accurate. Cold weather should prevent the court from responding too vigorously to his opponent’s spin. If, however, play should be disrupted by the sort of gale that ripped a piece of panelling off the video screen yesterday, it will favour Nadal, who grew up playing in the trade winds that buffet Majorca.

There is another men’s quarterfinal to be played tomorrow, of course, and it involves one of the five men who have beaten Nadal on the red dirt this season: Andy Murray. This is uncharted territory for Murray, for while he is far from being a stranger to the second week of the French Open, he has never achieved previously the sort of clay-court form that has enabled him to win 14 successive matches. If he beats David Ferrer Wednesday, that will equal his career-best winning run, set on hard courts during the 2001 Asian swing.

Mind you, Ferrer is not known for going quietly, and has won all his four previous meetings with Murray on this surface. “There can be a lot of running against David if you allow him to dictate the points,” Murray said yesterday. “Something I feel like I’ve done a better job of on the clay this year is not playing so defensively. When I’ve had the chance I have stepped into the court. Because David is not as hard a hitter as somebody like (Jeremy) Chardy you have the opportunity to do that.”

Djokovic and Nadal have met 43 times on the professional tour